Moving towards the next stage of Enterprise 2.0

This week has been very busy for me and I did not manage to win the mac book despite having one of my blog post being published. But I am very happy, the Confluence adoption in my company has evolved to the next stage.

It all started with small groups putting down information for their own reference before expanding to gradually larger groups. It followed from a dissemination model where the main contributor will provide the main bulk of information and users will search and use and add on to the information.

I realized the changes when I got 2 separate requests to separate the information into another space so that only the necessary information will be accessible by other groups. And it will allow members of both groups to post information to exchange with each other. The networks are gradually formed when people realize the benefits and invite other people or groups to join in.

With the moving to the next stage, I am expecting to see more collaboration between groups. It is nearer to the objective to help ourselves to work more efficiently and possibly promote more innovation.

My vision with E2.0

The following is my dream of how people are tapping technology to improve the way we work.

Imagine a following scenario:

1) A company's marketing department is having their monthly department meeting. Each of them has a laptop in front of them.

2) One of the members, Wayne is on an overseas assignment, but he manages to join in the meeting via tele-conferencing.

3) The department head, Mr Ho starts by presenting the meeting agenda on a blog post announcement

4) While Mr Ho is talking, several colleagues who want to talk will press a button to indicate his/her interest. Johnny manages to get the right to speak via the acknowledgement from the system. He knows he can start talking once Mr Ho finishes.

5) As Mr Ho is speaking, his speech is transcribed into text via the voice-to-text application and appears in the chat window.

6) When he stops, the Johnny continues on with his report. The other users references to materials in his report via a wiki link in the dept meeting blogpost.

7) Mr Ho interrupts Johhny's presentation with a question. The system intelligently notices that it is Mr Ho (via volume from the mic) and updates the current speaker in the chat window

8) As the meeting goes on, Stephanie (the secretary for the meeting) highlights the main points in the chatrooms with her laptop. She can also indicate whether this is a task and who is the assignee to follow up.She can also remove portions that are not relevant which can be undone.

9) The big boss Colin enters the room because he just ended another meeting next door. He logs in the chatroom to scan through the highlights to find out what has been discussed so that he has the context to join in the discussion effectively.

10) At the end of the meeting, the team scans through the chat window to review the meeting highlights and deletes any non-relevant stuff.

11) The podcast is generated with the non-relevant portion removed. The draft for the meeting minutes is generated instantly with the highlights and minor edits done by Stephanie. Wayne's dashboard on his personal homepage will also be updated with the additional tasks assigned to him during the meeting.

12) All the relevant documents are stored as a link in the meeting blogpost so that others can reference it in future if needed. The entire department will get notified via RSS.

With this setup:

• The geological barrier can be reduced. It might be possible to people to work from home or go on longer holidays without affecting their work.


• Meetings can start on time without waiting for everyone to be present


• There is no need to spend time to review meeting minutes and passing emails around


• Information can be accessed conveniently without having to print reports that will be useless after the meetings


• Tasks can be tracked easily and workload can be distributed more evenly


• Time is saved without having someone to draft the minutes for every meeting.

Knowledge Harvesting with Wikis

I am so happy. A segment of the my lengthy post was published on the newspaper on tuesday. It means the ideas communicated are meaningful for the masses to read.

The entire post is reproduced here:

To add to my previous post of using wikis to supplement intranet, wiki is also a
practical tool for knowledge base.

1) Corporate wikipedia
For those organizations with intensive amount of domain knowledge, it will be good to have a corporate wikipedia to explain the terms in details. It is necessary to have this because some of the terms and abbreviations cannot be searched from Google or it might differ slightly from the standard definition. Wikis are appropriate because new terms and updates can be added or corrected by anyone easily. It is much difficult and tedious to keep the static pages up to date if the web administrator has to be informed to make any changes. Another advantage is that other relevant wiki pages can be linked up. The success story of Wikipedia has proved that this idea is feasible.

2) FAQs
We do encounter questions in our course of work regularly. It can be quite exasperating when the same questions are being asked again and again. It can also be quite embarrassing if someone returns with the same question that was answered previously. Therefore a wiki FAQ comes in helpful and the knowledge can grow over time.One example is the "What a newbie should know" page. While there is a standard briefing or orientation for new staffs, it can be quite overwhelming for a new staff to digest the huge amount of "information download" within a short timespan. And unofficial information (company SOPs, where to get paper for the photocopy machine, how to setup your new PC, ....) are usually missed out during the initial briefing. With this information available, it will definitely help the new staff to adjust in the new environment faster. Then the new staff can also update any other questions and answers they encountered. It save time rather than to repeat the same stuff again for each new staff.

3) How-to manuals
Manuals are also a possible application of wikis. The instructions or steps can be listed in a wiki pages. For some complicated steps, the detailed instructions for a particular step can be accessed from another wiki pages. This save time for the author to replicate the same information for all the manuals containing the particular steps. Readers can also benefit with a smaller amount of information to process if they already know how the complex step can be done. For those steps that cannot be explained by words easily, pictures or video clips taken from handphones can also be attached on the page to illustrate the steps clearly. If the readers got any questions, the discussion can be conducted via the comments feature. Subsequently the content can be improved with more detailed explanation.

I am Knowledge Worker 2.0

Care to know who (and what) is Knowledge Worker 2.0 about?

Wikis as addons to intranet and corporate file server

This is my post to the blog4biz contest....

A good idea on how to use wikis must be substantiated with good benefits of using it.In our course of work, we generate a lot of documents.

A typical scenario will be:

1. The author creates an initial draft of the document
2. He emails out the document as an attachments to the relevant parties for reviewing
3. He waits for email replies from the relevant parties
4. He then compiles on the changes required from one or more emails. It is possible that a single point might be raised by multiple parties.
5. He makes the suggested changes to the document
6. If there is a version control system in place, he will need to update the document version number and state down why the changes being made
7. He then emails out the finalized version
8. A copy of the document is saved in the corporate file server, his local PC or even just as an email attachments

It is possible that he saves the document in a file server and email the soft links out for others to make the changes directly.

The advantages of using wikis for documents :

1) Automatic email notification or RSS - There is no need to reply to the email after the changes are made. The author will also be notified of the changes instead of waiting for email response

2) Automatic tracking of changes - Changes are tracked and it is easy to identify which section are added or deleted, thus promoting accountability.It is double effort for the reviewers to point out where the changes should be and for the authors to update the suggested changes. Time is also saved without the need to list down what are the changes being made.

3) Automatic version control - Changes by who and when can be identified easily and the version number is always be updated. Subject experts can also be identified through their authorship.

4) Support rollback - Changes can be undone to previous versions easily

5) Single point of storage - People will know where to look for information instead of searching the corporate file server, local pc and their inbox. There is also a lower likelihood that a wrong version of the document is being passed around. The worse scenario is that an older document is updated with new content and circulated as the latest version.The possibility of the document being lost when the local PC or inbox is corrupted or reformatted when someone else take over the PC.

6) Powerful search engine - It will be fast and easy to search the documents with keywords

7) Support linking - Relevant documents can be linked up together and terms can be looked up via the corporate wikipedia.

8) Comments - It will promote the thinking and collaboration process and also allow tracking on the rationale of decisions being made.

9) Support multiple editing - Save time on compiling the changes. And anyone can update the document if required. People will also try to keep the documents up-to-date if it is being referenced upon frequently.

However, I must stress that wikis are not all-encompassing. It is still more efficient to use MS Powerpoint for presentations and MS Excel for working with formulas. However we can tap on the strengths of wikis by putting up the soft links to the documents with relevant keywords so that the documents can be searched easily by others. For those documents that are not edited frequently, it might even be possible to post it as attachments to the wiki.

The importance of timely knowledge

Image from http://www.visitsingapore.com

Last month, I was in Chinatown and parked at the car park at a HDB car park for 5 hours at a rate of $2 per hour.

Last week, I went down to Chinatown again. But this time, I had some available time beforehand. So I tried to find out the parking rates in the vicinity from http://imode.onemotoring.com.sg/. To my surprise, there was a few shopping complexes offering parking at $2 per entry which is 5 times or more cheaper than my previous visit.

This is a really good example of handing the right knowledge on hand. For experienced drivers, they do definitely know which car parks offer cheap parking rates. But for new drivers, if the information has not been put up, then they will have to ask around or learn through the hard way of paying. But I was definitely luckier because I know the right place to search for the information and the information has been put up on the site.

Similarly, for businesses, it is vital to have the accurate information on hand for decision making. Without the timely information or knowledge, it could means reduced profits or even major losses.

What No One Ever Tells You About .... Blogging within the company

Linked from http://bloggingforbusinessbook.com/

I have just finished this book by Ted Demopoulos. It has a good coverage on blogging and podcasting.

One of the business uses of blogs mentioned in the book is that internal blogs help teams to communicate. While the idea of using blogs to communicate with external customers is getting popular with lots of organizations, intra-organization blogs are still foreign to many organizations. This could be due to the general trend of being more customer-focused.

However the employees are also an important asset of the organization. They should also be empowered with more information so that they can work more effectively. This is where the use of internal blogs come in.

1) The top management can periodically disseminate information on the strategies and business focus so that the employees can act in alignment of the business goals. For big organisations, sometimes the information is not passed down effectively and completely. Another benefit is that the middle management can save time to re-telecast the information down.

2) Teams could update their work progress or any issues they encountered. The bosses can keep up to date on the progress and step in if needed. Members from other teams who have encountered the similar issues could come in and provide advice.

3) Any fun or interesting events like fundraising or the arrival of a newborn in the company can also be blogged down. People can send their well wishes through the blog post. Another good example is from Atlassian. They blogged down the details about their annual company event. This will help in improving the employee participation and cohesiveness of the big organization.

4) Historical events could be blogged down so that anyone (especially new employees) can find out more and can possibly use it for reference or find out the reasons why things are being done now.

5) Teams could also share on the useful knowledge that they think is useful for others.

This will help to promote self-learning among employees and could possibly promote new innovation. In addition, people will be able to know who is the expert to look for.

While it is possible to publish the same information within the company newsletters or emails, they are usually dumped away after reading. The benefits of using blogs is that people can participate by giving comments and the information is archived and retrieved with ease.